We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lauren Klein. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lauren below.

Lauren, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

I had been thinking about what to name the business for a long time. It was weighing on me. One day while in a storage room at my parents house, I looked up and saw a rocking horse my grandfather made for my sister. He was a carpenter. He had signed the bottom, “Handcrafted with Pride” and signed his name. I thought it was fitting for what I was doing with my bon bon designs! Thus Handcrafted Chocolate was born.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m from Freehold, New Jersey. I grew up in the kitchen with my grandmother. We started simple with scrambled eggs but I couldn’t get enough. In high school I attended a culinary arts program at Freehold High School. The program changed the way I thought about baking. I went to Johnson and Wales in Providence, Rhode Island for Baking and Pastry Arts & Food Service Management.

After college I worked in New York City for five years. I worked for some great restaurants including Blue Smoke & Maialino (both apart of Danny Meyers USHG) during my time in NYC. When the pandemic hit NYC, the hospitality industry was devastated. Like many others in the industry, I found myself without work and saw greater opportunities outside New York.

I returned home to the jersey shore during the summer of 2020. That winter while the pandemic raged on, I offered bake sales out of my parents house. I would post my menus on an Instagram account I dedicated to baking. I sold pies for Thanksgiving, cookies for Christmas (which I shipped nationwide) and then for Valentines day I moved on to chocolates. I offered a 12 piece bon bon box that year and hot cocoa bombs. It was also around this time that I connected with the owner of a local lunch business, Mike at Tatchen’s. Mike and I negotiated the use of his commercial kitchen space during his off hours. After the success of the Valentines day sale, I spent time thinking about how to create an actual long term business. I took the ecommerce chocolate idea and ran with it. That following September (2021) I launched my business, Handcrafted Chocolate, with 10 signature flavors that I offer in different sized assorted boxes for nationwide shipping & local pick up. I now have expanded that signature collection to 12 flavors, I offer seasonal collections and do local pop ups.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

I am pretty active on social media. Especially Instagram! I would say I get most of my business through Instagram and Facebook! I took a business course early on and she stressed the importance of touch points. (shout out to Empowered Confidence) Lets connect!

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

So I sell from my own website (that I built myself using the platform Shopify). I decided to go this route so it would be mine, in some ways it seemed more official to me at the time but I am in no way discrediting anyone. At first it also seemed like a much easier task, to build my website than it actually was. It took me the entire business course + some to figure it all out. The entire summer of ’21.

I suppose that would be my only con, that it took me a long time but I think everything else outweighs that. I also felt really accomplished once everything came together! Pros would be that you’re not giving a significant amount of money per sale to another entity. While there is still a yearly fee I pay to use Shopify, its not exactly the same. They also offer credit card processing and other features I liked.

Contact Info:

• Website: handcraftedbylauren.com
• Instagram: Handcraftedchocolate
• Facebook: Handcrafted Chocolate

Image Credits
there are two from another article that have the credits listed on them. besides those they are personal photos